JoarYou have twenty products, a few hundred followers, and a decision to make before you can sell anything. Every comparison you find says Shopify is "easy" and WooCommerce is "free". Neither word helps you set a budget. This guide works through the Shopify vs WooCommerce cost question the way you would at a kitchen table: list every line you will actually pay in the first twelve months, then decide.
We build WooCommerce and Laravel stores for clients, so you should know where we stand. We also think Shopify is the right answer for a lot of first-time sellers, and we will say when.
What you pay on Shopify
Shopify is a subscription. You rent the software and the hosting together, and you pay monthly or yearly.
At the time of writing, the entry plan (Basic) is listed at around $39 a month billed monthly, or roughly $29 a month if you pay for a year up front. Prices differ by country and change from time to time, so check the official Shopify pricing page for your region before you plan around these numbers.
The lines that make up a real Shopify budget:
- Plan fee. The number on the pricing page.
- Card processing. If Shopify Payments is available in your country, you pay its card rates and no extra platform fee. If it is not available and you use another payment provider, Shopify adds its own transaction fee on top of what that provider charges (Shopify's help pages call these third-party transaction fees). On the Basic plan this has been 2% for a long time. Shopify Payments is only offered in certain countries, so check this first. It can change your numbers more than anything else here.
- Theme. Free themes are decent. Paid themes are a one-time purchase, often in the low hundreds of dollars.
- Apps. This is the line that grows quietly. Reviews, upsells, better filters, SMS, a size chart: many are monthly subscriptions of a few dollars to a few tens of dollars each.
- Domain. Around the price of any domain, paid yearly.
What you pay on WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a free plugin for WordPress. The software costs nothing, but a store needs somewhere to live and a few pieces around it.
- Hosting. This is the main cost. Cheap shared hosting can be a few dollars a month on an introductory deal. Hosting built for WordPress stores costs more. Watch for promotional first-year prices that renew at a much higher rate.
- Domain and SSL. Many hosts include a free SSL certificate now. The domain is the same yearly cost as on Shopify.
- Theme. Free themes exist. Premium themes are usually a one-time fee with a yearly renewal for updates.
- Extensions. Many useful plugins are free. Some important ones (certain payment gateways, subscriptions, advanced shipping rules) are paid yearly licences.
- Payment processing. WooCommerce charges no platform fee on sales. You pay whatever your gateway charges. WooCommerce's own gateway, WooPayments, has no monthly fee and charges per transaction, with rates that depend on your country and your customer's country. See the WooPayments fees page for current rates.
- Your time, or someone else's. Updates, backups, a plugin that conflicts with another plugin after an update. Someone has to deal with this.
A worked first-year example
Here is a sample budget for a small store doing modest sales. These are example figures for illustration only, not quotes. Replace every number with current prices from the official pages and your chosen host.
| Line item (example) | Shopify Basic | WooCommerce |
|---|---|---|
| Plan or hosting, 12 months | $348 (annual billing) | $120 to $300 depending on host |
| Domain | $15 | $15 |
| Theme | $0 (free theme) | $0 to $80 |
| Apps or paid extensions | $20/month × 12 = $240 | $0 to $150 |
| Platform transaction fee | $0 with Shopify Payments, or 2% of sales without it | $0 |
| Maintenance help | Usually none needed | $0 if you do it, more if you pay someone |
| Rough total before card fees | About $600 | About $135 to $545 |
Now add the platform fee in the case where Shopify Payments is not available to you. If you sell $20,000 in a year through a third-party gateway, a 2% fee is $400 extra. That one line can make Shopify the more expensive option by a wide margin, and it is the line most comparison articles skip.
Card processing itself (the 2 to 3% plus a small fixed fee that card networks and processors take) is roughly similar on both platforms if you use comparable gateways, so we left it out of the table.
The costs nobody puts in the table
Time to launch. Shopify gets a basic store live in an afternoon. A first-time WordPress user should expect WooCommerce to take days, not hours, especially for shipping rules, taxes and payment setup.
Things breaking. On Shopify the platform keeps the store running. On WooCommerce, you or your developer own the updates. Most months nothing goes wrong. The month something does is usually a busy one.
App creep. A Shopify store with ten monthly apps can cost more than the plan itself. Audit your apps every few months and remove anything you don't check.
Leaving later. Moving away from either platform takes work. WooCommerce gives you the database and files. With Shopify you export products, customers and orders as CSV files and rebuild the theme somewhere else.
Cash on delivery and local couriers. If you sell in South Asia, the Middle East or parts of Africa, many orders will be cash on delivery and booked with local couriers. Both platforms can take COD orders. Check before you choose whether there is a working, maintained integration for your local courier and payment options. In our region, that integration question often decides the platform more than the price does.
Who should pick Shopify
- You want to sell this month and have no interest in servers or updates.
- Shopify Payments works in your country, so you avoid the extra transaction fee.
- You sell mostly by card, to customers in the US, UK, EU or similar markets.
- Your catalogue and checkout are standard: products, variants, shipping, done.
Who should pick WooCommerce
- You already know WordPress, or have someone you trust who does.
- Shopify Payments is not available where you are, so you would pay the extra fee on every sale.
- You need unusual things: local courier booking, custom product options, a checkout that works the way your customers expect.
- You want full ownership of the data and the code.
If you are torn between WooCommerce and a fully custom build later on, we wrote a separate piece on WordPress vs a custom Laravel site.
A quick way to decide in ten minutes
- Open the Shopify pricing page and check whether Shopify Payments is available in your country.
- Estimate your first-year sales honestly. Halve your optimistic number.
- If Shopify Payments is not available, multiply that sales figure by the third-party fee for your plan. Write the result down.
- List the three or four extra features you know you need. Look up whether each one is a monthly app on Shopify or a free or yearly plugin on WooCommerce.
- Ask yourself who will fix the site at 11 p.m. on a sale day. If the answer is "nobody", lean towards Shopify.
FAQ
Q: Is WooCommerce really free? A: The plugin is free. Hosting, a domain, some extensions and your time are not. A small WooCommerce store can still cost less per year than Shopify, but it is never zero.
Q: Does Shopify charge a fee on every sale? A: You always pay card processing. The extra Shopify transaction fee applies when you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments. Check the current rate for your plan on Shopify's pricing page.
Q: Which is cheaper over three years? A: For stores that grow, WooCommerce often ends up cheaper because there are fewer monthly app fees and no platform fee on sales. That only holds if maintenance doesn't eat the savings.
Q: Can I switch later? A: Yes, but plan for it to take real effort. Products and customers move fairly easily. Design, URLs and custom features take the most work.
If you decide on WooCommerce and want to see what a finished store can look like before you commit, you can browse our live store theme previews.